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Box Office 2014: Moviegoing Hits Two-Decade Low
mrspoonsi writes The number of people going to the movies in 2014 in North America slipped to its lowest level in two decades. According to preliminary estimates, roughly 1.26 billion consumers purchased cinema tickets between Jan. 1 and Dec. 31. That's the lowest number since 1.21 billion in 1995. Year-over-year, attendance looks to be off 6 percent from 2013, when admissions clocked in at 1.34 billion. Admissions have fluctuated dramatically over the years, and particularly since the advent of modern-day 3D, which can skew the average ticket price. Movie going in North America hit an all-time high in 2002, when 1.57 billion consumers lined up, thanks in part to Spider-Man, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Star Wars: Episode II — Attack of the Clones, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and My Big Fat Greek Wedding.
So movie attendance was at its peak at the height of easy money and is in a local 20-year valley at the bottom of a 60-year workforce participation chart.
Therefore, it must be the Pirate Bay's fault. Q.E.D.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
No, it can't be. It can't be that going to the movies has become some endeavor you have to financially plan before setting out on it (with parking, food and all you'd be lucky to get out below 20 bucks per person). Let alone that people have less money in a depression as well and movies is one of the FIRST things to cut back at (seriously, if your choice is to eat tomorrow or to see a movie tonight...). It can't be that we don't want to "enjoy" our movie in the presence of people who grew up in a barn. It can't be that we get headaches from the "invisible" flickering and whatnot introduced to keep us from using our cellphones to record the movie. It can't be that the script of the average movie fits on a legal page and the renarration of the content fits easily on a post-it.
It must be due to sharing platforms. Yeah, that's why.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
But they now have all the information needed to make the ultimate blockbuster:
Star Wars: Episode XXII — Spider-Man & Harry Potter versus The Lord of Clones at A Big Fat Greek Wedding !
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
Yup, thats my problem with movie theaters lately. They stopped enforcing common decency a long time ago, but overall people would be somewhat decent. There was always the ONE dick who wouldn't shut up, but now its the norm more than the exception. And all those people who just can't stop texting continually (if they're not downright talking on the phone). And if you complain, you're the one who "needs to deal with it".
So as everything else in our society, you just have to isolate yourself (because even if you try to just group up with like minded individuals, someone will slip in just to troll you). And then we wonder why there's such big gaps between various groups in the US...
Once you've bought into the idea of watching recordings, it doesn't matter so much whether you watch them on an enormous screen in a theater or on a computer screen at home. Price and convenience then favor the computer screen.
If you want to put the "human" back in humanities, try live theater. I never used to like live theater because the only options I thought I had were productions in high schools (which are sometimes pretty good but often not as good as films) and fancy travelling productions with hundred-dollar tickets in intimidatingly fancy theaters (which are good, but hardly as casual as a movie). Then I discovered the Shakespeare Tavern in Midtown Atlanta, which is a professional group that has cheap ($20!) tickets on Thursdays. Atlanta isn't an especially cultured city overall; if we have something like this, I suspect most other cities will, too.
I've seen six distinct plays at the local theater (and rewatched all of them at least once) and films in movie theaters are no longer the same. Sure, I enjoyed Interstellar---that movie's attitude towards science would go over well on Slashdot---but it tends to use dramatic [manipulative!] music to make you care about the characters. But when you're watching a live production, you care about the characters because they're people---live people. not a hundred feet away! The exchange works both ways; the actors are more animated because they're presenting to a live audience instead of a camera. I tried watching three film versions of Twelfth Night after repeatedly watching it live; none of the film versions even came close to the live one. (Of minor note is that the theater in *my* town doesn't alter or remove anything from the original Shakespeare scripts; your town's troupe may do things differently.)
This post isn't meant as an endorsement of Shakespeare in particular so much as live theater in general. Don't assume that live theater is either too expensive or poorly-done; in Atlanta, at least, you can watch professional actors for the price of two movie tickets. I would encourage everyone to take a look at what their cities have to offer.
Going to a movie.
You really should go with someone. Sure you can see a movie alone, it feels really weird.
Movie Tickets cost about $9 - $15 bucks Being that you bring someone you will need to double that.
Even if you are able to cheap out and not get raped by the concession stand. The person you are going with may want something. So that adds $5 - $10 to it.
So you have spend $40 for 2 hours of entertainment, if you don't like the movie then that is a lot of money wasted.
For that money you can get 3-4 months of streaming movies. Where you can watch as much as you want.
If theaters want to improve movie going. They will need to treat their customers as guests.
Cheaper prices concession food. Don't nitpick about people who bring in their own food.
Put restrooms in quick distance from the theater.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Lol
It still fits, especially when you consider that, instead of putting the blame where it rightly belongs (mostly folks watching movies at home via PPV/Netflix/iTMS/etc), you just know the fsckers are going to shout the "P" word and demand that BitTorrent be made illegal or somesuch.
Personally, I think it has to do with a lot of factors, even outside of the Netflix effect; chief among them is that most movies sucked pretty hard this year, with very few good ones coming out. The same old formulaic bullshit just isn't going to pull in the ducats, you know?
To top that off, I noticed something else: There are some damned good (and compelling) shows coming out of television these days. It used to be that TV had crappy SFX and production values, while the movies had the best-of-breed in SFX, acting, production, etc. Nowadays, you can rarely tell the difference in many cases - when you have masterful series coming out of the networks which have nearly the same cinematic and production quality of the studios, then why bother with whatever the studios have to offer? There's still the adverts in most cases (outside of HBO/Cinemax/etc), but there are a zillion technologies which can neatly get around that, so...
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
What, you mean you don't want to see "Iron Man vs. Ant Man vs. The Fantastic Four While Spiderman Wacks Off In a Corner 2: Rise of the Who-Gives-A-Fuck"?
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
It's not just cost, it's also how far home theaters have come.
20 - 30 years ago, a really nice sounds system and really nice TV couldn't match the quality of a movie. I'm talking about big ass projection TVs that cost thousands of dollars for crappy picture quality, when movie theaters showed movies on actual FILM.
Now, with flat screen HD Tvs under a grand, and amazing surround system also for relatively cheap, we've changed the formula.
Before, I was paying for an experience I couldn't duplicate. Amazing sound, amazing picture quality, on a really big screen.
Now, I can duplicate the experience at home for cheaper. And there are a ton of incentives.
Besides cost:
1. I can drink whatever I want (including beer, wine, and scotch) with unlimited refills.
2. There's never an obnoxious pair of people who won't shut up next to me.
3. If the movie is really thought provoking, and as a group we discuss it, we won't be annoying anyone else.
4. Movies show whenever I want -- I can decide to sit down for a Matrix Marathon at 3am if I want.
5. Every movie I buy, I keep forever. I won't rewatch every movie I buy, but some I find myself going back to time and again. And in the off chance someone ends up stuck at my place (I've had friends need a place to crash because there was construction in their place, or maybe their block lost power in a storm), I can just give them my Apple TV remote and tell them to entertain themselves.
Theaters need to sell a unique experience if they want to get people. (Just look at how many people go for IMAX releases of things like Avatar). But recently there's been no innovation, just a constant increasing of costs for consumers: ticket prices, cost of food, etc.
This gets mentioned a lot on Slashdot but, in reality, the number of "good" movies has remained reasonably unchanged each year.
Here are the movies in the IMDB Top 250 grouped and counted by year:
IMDB ratings have a serious problem as far as new movies are concerned, as the latest movie of any reasonable quality tends to get many people rating it a "10" (which should mean it's perfect). It takes a while before a movie settles down to what its real rating should be. This is caused by the "aging" algorithm and number of required votes per year that IMDB uses. It means that a movie that has a lot of buzz will be listed until everybody stops caring about it and it drops out of the list, even if it has a rating that is technically better than movies in the list.
Likewise, there is no reason for movies in the top 250 to be evenly distributed by year. It's far more likely that good movies should be much older, as being evenly distributed by year implies that this year movies have been good enough to push some other movies out of the top 250, which means that the best movies are getting better, which most people agree isn't true. Even, then, there are a lot a problems with ratings being inflated as time goes by. As little as 5 years ago, a movie could crack the top 250 with less than an 8.0 rating, but now some movies are left off even though they have that same rating.
If you use IMDB info, the "Top 1000 Voters" and "Metascore" are far better indicators of the overall quality of the movie, especially if you take into account the number of "Top 1000" that entered a rating for the movie. Basically, these are people who see and rate a lot more movies than anybody else, so even if their score is high for the movie, if a lot of them never rated it, that says something by itself. For example, Star Wars and The Dark Knight are two movies that have both been around for long enough for everyone to get a chance to see them and vote on them, and have ratings of 8.6 and 8.2 from the top voters, with 930 and 898 votes. Both ratings are close to the overall ratings. On the other hand, The Hunt from 2012 (also old enough for such die hard movie viewers to have seen it) gets a 7.3 (considerably lower than the 8.3 from all voters), but only 421 bothered to see it. Django Unchained from the same year, OTOH, gets 710 votes for a rating of 7.8 (still lower than the 8.5 from all voters, but not as much of a drop). The confidence that the rating on Django Unchained is more accurate is much higher. Even using overall votes, Interstellar has less than half the votes compared to the average of the two movies immediately surrounding it on the list, and as such will eventually fall to where it really belongs.